I write and talk and think a lot about gender representation in toys, games, and just in general media and the world around me. My aim and hope is to show the places where gender representation is missing or problematic. When I think about girls having access to and playing with LEGO, for example, I hope they can experience LEGO in the way I did when I was a kid. I hope they can play with both the LEGO sets from the “blue” aisle and they LEGO sets from the “pink” aisle. I wish we didn’t have “blue” and “pink” aisles. And, I wish boys and girls could play together. I don’t want to see LEGO commercials showing only girls playing with the Friends sets or only boys playing with the City sets. I want to see the kids playing with all the sets.
No part of my hopes, aims, and goals include excluding boys in any way. When I think about feminism and equality, I don’t think about misandry. I don’t think that the only way to even the playing field is to take something away from others. I just want to even the playing field. I just want boys and girls to have access to the same toys, and, later, to the same opportunities as adults. So, when I read about a situation where a teacher has decided that the best way to make sure girls have access to LEGO is to restrict the boys’ access to the bricks, I get a little angry. Angry because that’s not my view of feminism. We can all, of course, have different views of feminism and what feminism means to us as individuals, but this type of story, this intentional exclusion of boys is moving totally in the wrong direction and really just undermines everything many of us hope to accomplish. The article above describes a kindergarden class where a teacher was found to be intentionally excluding boys. The article begins with the following, and never gets much better:
In Karen Keller’s kindergarten classroom, boys can’t play with Legos.
They can have their pick of Tinkertoys and marble tracks, but the colorful bricks are “girls only.”
“I always tell the boys, ‘You’re going to have a turn’ — and I’m like, ‘Yeah, when hell freezes over’ in my head,” she said. “I tell them, ‘You’ll have a turn’ because I don’t want them to feel bad.”
In a follow-up article and interview with the school, the teacher says she didn’t mean it that way and the remark was just an off-the-cuff comment, and I was glad to read that the teacher seems to have reflected on this and changed this practice in her classroom. But, the off-the-cuff comment along with the deliberate exclusion of boys still begs a lot of questions. Why exclude the boys? What does that really accomplish? And, why lie to them?
Honestly, when I initially read the article, I thought it had to be satire. It seemed like someone was trying to poke fun at extremists, but it’s not satire. Both articles are from a small, local news outlet presenting information about the practices in this kindergarten class. Unfortunately, the follow-up article indicates that the teacher received a lot of backlash in the form of hate messages and phone calls. That’s not ok either. Hate messages and harassing phone calls don’t change the conversation. I imagine this teacher was trying to do the right thing (however misguided her approach was), so education and thoughtful conversations would have been the better way to go.
LEGO was always intended to be for both girls and boys. Many marketing campaigns over the past few decades have made it easier for many people to identify LEGO as a toy aimed at boys, but it was always aimed at both. While I work towards and hope for more equitable gender representation in LEGO, the answer, of course, is not to take the boys out of the equation all together.
